Home Blog Page 155

lenten journal: tune my heart

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
-
2

I’m in over my head. One chapter into This Is Your Brain on Music and my brain is reeling, trying to take in all the terms and ideas Daniel J. Levitin has crammed into the first chapter. There is enough metaphor and music in those fifty-odd pages to keep me writing all through the night, if not all through Lent.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

I was in second grade when I started taking piano lessons. We always had a piano in our house when I was a kid, though no one spent much time there. My mom would sit down every so often and play one or two hymns that she knew, but that was about it. She also knew she wanted me to take lessons, so I did. For six months. And it was the seventh teacher who came out to the car and said, “Mrs. Cunningham, your son has musical talent and it will come out one day, but do him a favor and do me a favor and let him quit taking piano.”

Thus endeth the lessons.

What was happening in my lessons was I was learning to play by ear, rather than learning to read music. I got some of the basics – F A C E and Every Good Boy Deserves Favour (she was British) – and could pick notes out enough to play the piece, sort of, but when she would stop me because I would make a mistake, I would say, “You play it so I can see how it sounds.” I could memorize what she played and repeat it faster than I could learn to read the notes. She caught me because she intentionally made errors and then I duplicated her mistakes.

I was in ninth grade before I got serious about an instrument, which was the acoustic guitar – and I still play. And I still don’t read music. I know chords, enough theory to be dangerous, and I still have a pretty good ear. When I look at a piece of written music, it feels like I’m looking at something in a foreign language, which is a good analogy because written music has a linguistic quality. I read music about like I speak Spanish. Un poco.

My friend, Randy Brown, is the reason I’m reading the book. He and I go back to Baylor days and working together on our act for All University Sing at Baylor. Music has been a part of our friendship from the first. So when he called to say the book would not only help me understand more about music, but would also teach me some things about me, I decided to read it for Lent. He also told me the first couple of chapters were pretty heavy on science and music theory, but to do the work to get through them because it would pay off. And, even though I feel stretched and a little lost, I’m already glad I’m reading.

I’m struggling with how to speak about what I’m learning without having to recap all the technical and scientific stuff, as well as the musical stuff, to set up what I want to say. I think the best I can do is hit the high points and encourage you to get the book because he explains things very well.

Levitin says pitch, rhythm, and timbre are the three key elements when we begin talking about music. Pitch, he says, is a psychological construct that answers the question, “What note is that?” When the hammer on a piano hits the string and the string vibrates, the vibration only becomes a tone when we hear it, which is to say it is psychological because it happens in our heads. Pitch is also one of the main ways musical emotions are conveyed. Melodies are relationships of successive pitches across time that our brain can learn to recognize, even when the melody is in a different key – at a different pitch – that what we heard before.

One more definition: tuning refers to the relationship between the tone and a standard (as in tuning the guitar) or between two or more tones being played together (as in tuning an orchestra). There’s more, but I’m going to stop here and say, since I read the chapter this morning the line (and melody) that has stayed in my head is, “Tune my heart to sing thy praise.”

And so Lent begins, for me, as a tuning exercise, if you will: tuning my heart to God and to those around me, seeking to hear and recognize the melody of grace in whatever key it may come, high or low. “Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing” is a hymn that serves as both melody and metaphor for me. It is both one of my favorite texts and one of my favorite tunes, when it comes to hymns, and one that has had a significant place in the soundtrack of my life.

o to grace how great a debtor
daily I’m constrained to be
let thy goodness like a fetter
bind my wandering heart to thee
prone to wander Lord I feel it
prone to leave the God I love
here’s my heart Lord take and seal it
seal it for thy courts above

There have been times when this was a jubilant hymn: Sunday nights singing with my youth group in Fort Worth; days when the song came soft and low in the darkness of my depression; times when it carried reassuring memories and seedlings of hope as Ginger and I made moves and changes together; and nights when it was the bonding melody of friendship, sitting around our living room with guitars and other instruments, singing songs we knew by heart. Each time, my heart was tuned both to God and those around me.

Life, in many ways, is something we have to play by ear, if you will: there’s no set score to follow or part to memorize. Still, our lives go on in endless song. To learn the melody we must listen and tune our hearts to sing together.

Peace,
Milton

fast tuesday

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
-
1

It was somewhere in the middle of the day that I remembered today was Fat Tuesday, Mardi Gras, Shrove Tuesday, meaning tomorrow Lent begins. It feels more like Fast Tuesday: it got here quickly. I know part of the surprise for me is my work schedule keeps me from doing anything during the week but work. I leave the house each morning, Monday through Thursday, about ten-thirty and get home around nine-thirty at night, which pretty much kills the day. The other part is we have not found any continuing traditions around Fat Tuesday here in Durham that have helped us make the day more of a marker. All of that said, I think it’s kind of funny that it snuck up on me because I’ve been thinking about Lent for a couple of weeks now because I’ve been thinking about my Lenten Journal, which has been my practice for several years now: I write everyday, aiming for a thousand words a day, through Easter Sunday. I’ve known tomorrow was Ash Wednesday and it still caught me by surprise, thanks to what fills up my life and makes it harder to hear, or, should I say, to listen.

I have learned over the years that I must also be reading for my writing to spiritual practice during these days. Thanks to a referral by my friend Randy, I started This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession by Daniel Levitin, which promises to be quite thought provoking. Thanks to Ginger’s sermon a couple of weeks ago, I am rereading Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life. Thanks to Ginger’s Valentine’s gift to me, I have a couple of issues of Harper’s Magazine that always have something to surprise me and are always so eloquently written. Thanks to a study I am going to be leading at church for four Saturdays during Lent, I’ve been reading the Book of Job, and will continue doing so.

The season, it seems, is beginning with thanks, which is a good place to start.

Now, I’m going to take advantage of a chance to get a good night’s sleep.

Peace,
Milton

everybody knows elvis

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
-
1

One of the things I love about Kate Campbell is she has Elvis songs: not covers, but songs in which he makes an appearance of some sort. She’s not the first to do it, but he does seem to enjoy showing up in her songs. One of her songs Friday night took me back to an old Don Henley tune, “If Dirt Were Dollars,” that holds these lines in the first verse:

I was flying back from Lubbock
and saw Jesus on the plane
or maybe it was Elvis
you know the kind of look the same

Henley was mostly looking for a laugh, even if it was sardonic, but Kate is aiming for something different. And she hits her target. Here are the lyrics to “Everybody Knows Elvis,” written with Mark Narmore on her CD, Save the Day:

Everybody knows Elvis
Everybody knows Jesus
Everybody knows you look both ways
Before you cross that road


And there’s nothing new
Under that old sun
Everybody knows Elvis
But you know nobody really does


Did you know him down in Tupelo
Did you know him on that Vegas show
Did you know him when he couldn’t sleep unstoned
Did you know him when he died all alone


Everybody knows Elvis
Everybody knows Jesus
Everybody knows beauty lies
In the eyes that behold


And two things that won’t die
True love and rock and roll
Everybody knows Jesus
But you know nobody really does


Did you know him in that upstairs room
Did you know him when that rooster sang his tune
Did you know him on that hill of doom
Did you know him when they laid him in that tomb


Cause everybody knows Elvis
Everybody knows Jesus
But you know nobody ever really does

As this Transfiguration Sunday draws to a close, I find myself humming along in anticipation for the turn coming in our liturgical calendar, Epiphany moving into Lent and our picture of Jesus moving from the One Who Came to the One Who is Going to the Cross. The baby in the manger is a far cry from the Jesus standing between Moses and Elijah as the Elvis on Ed Sullivan is from the 1968 Comeback Special. Both the later versions get more dangerous.

I love Advent and Christmastide and Epiphany, when the “glorious impossible” of the Incarnation is born again in our time; moving into Lent moves us from rejoicing in the compassion of God in human form to the somber reality of Jesus’ example of what it means to be human calling us to our own more authentic and dangerous existence. Long after Magi and mangers, we are left with a Messiah who is a freaking radical. Our three-year liturgical cycle has codified and ordered the stories, sometimes skipping over troubling verses, and, perhaps unwittingly, created a sense that we know the stories and their consequences.

Everybody knows Jesus.

For Valentine’s Day, Ginger gave me a new subscription to Harper’s Magazine. I let it expire a couple of years ago, as a cost cutting measure; I’m grateful for its return. In the “Findings” section, which is a random compilation of facts and statements juxtaposed in no particular order, the next to the last sentence reads, “People tend to think that God believes what they believe.

But you know no one ever really does.

I know I’ve still got a couple of days before Lent begins, along with my practice of a daily Lenten Journal, but I’m going to start early praying for disquietude. I’m ready for a comeback special of my own, which is to say I’m ready for some gospel changes in my own life, ready to see what kind of glorious damage an untamed God can do.

Stay tuned.

Peace,
Milton

a way with words

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
-
1

I went to hear Kate Campbell sing Friday night, which is a good thing to do when she comes to your town, or anywhere in driving distance. Her songs are full of faith and food, hope and history – both national and personal, making listening to her a reflective and thoughtful experience. One of her songs, “The Way Home,” was a touchstone for me in some of the darker days of my depression. After hearing her sing about her days growing up in the South during the height of the Civil Rights movement, I left thinking about how it is in life that we get from there to here: how we grow up, how we change, how we ingest what is fed to us, what we choose to hold on to.

Tonight, punching around with the remote, I came across a Gaither Gospel Hour show, which always catches my attention because I love singing old hymns. In one segment of the show, Bill Gaither was interviewing his wife, Gloria, about a song she had written and she said, in answer to one of his questions, “It’s important to have ideas bigger than your life.”

Their words and music took me here.

a way with words


The psalmist may have looked to the hills,
but all I have to do is drive by Hope Valley
Elementary to find the word for the week,
chosen to challenge their charges to growth
and greatness, or at least a better vocabulary.
I wonder what word I need to hear, what
big idea might be calling me from the valleys
of my own existence to heights and depths
I have not yet imagined. Then I think of
the words I know, words I have collected
and stacked on shelves; simple, one
syllable words: peace, love, faith, hope,
trust – all of them bigger than my life,
yet they too easily become part of the
scenery, more than the content of my
character. It’s one thing to quote; quite
another to let the word become flesh.

Peace,
Milton

sidewalk

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
-
0

It has rained all day
what snow was left has lost
its frozen self in the moisture
saturating the soil at every step

I am walking down to my car
with questions lining up like
sparrows on the lines of my mind
waiting for you to answer

as you do most every afternoon
when I call to say I am walking
and you smile into the phone
and you say my name

which matters on any afternoon
though today the sparrows are
thick as thieves I am cold and
it has rained all day

Peace,
Milton

tapping the walls

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
-
3

I love being married to a good preacher.

Sunday, she knocked it out of the park – or at least knocked me around a little bit, prophetically speaking. My musings tonight owe much to what she had to say yesterday.

I knew going in to church that her sermon was based on the Luke 5 passage where Jesus first gave fishing advice to the guys in the boat and then called them to drop what they were doing and follow him and “fish for people” instead. I don’t know the lectionary by heart, so I didn’t know the Old Testament reading was another favorite – Isaiah 6 – that begins with the sentence, “In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord.” The verse intrigues me because of a sermon I heard many years ago (I cannot remember the preacher) that challenged me to see the sentence as more than a marker in time. Isaiah wasn’t describing a chronological coincidence; he was making a statement of cause: something about the death of the king opened his eyes. Though I hold no attachment to any dead royalty, something about the circumstances of my life right now brought me to the same sense of sight. These are days that rumble with the distant thunder of change.

Ginger then invoked a third voice that made for a formidable trinity (small t, but powerful nonetheless): Annie Dillard, with this quote from The Writing Life:

The line of words is a hammer. You hammer against the walls of your house. You tap the walls, lightly, everywhere. After giving many years; attention to these things, you know what to listen for. Some of the walls are bearing walls; they have to stay, or everything will fall down. Other walls can go with impunity; you can hear the difference. Unfortunately, it is often a bearing wall that has to go. It cannot be helped. There is only one solution, which appalls you, but there it is. Knock it out. Duck.

From there, Ginger went on to paint the scene at the shore: Jesus calling out to the fruitless fishermen to drop their nets on the other side of the boat, they can hardly get to shore with their oversized catch, and then he says, “Leave your nets (yes, that would be the ones filled with fish), follow me, and I will show you how to fish for people.”

Growing up Southern Baptist, I was taught this story was about evangelism, hook, line, and sinker. Jesus calls us all to catch people and reel them in. Fair enough. But Ginger took a step back from the whole fishing metaphor to look at what Jesus asked the disciples to do, which was, in Annie Dillard’s terms, knock out a load bearing wall. Fishing in Galilee was lousy work. I would imagine it was a career you were born into, rather than being a chosen profession. You went out everyday in your little boat (read that literally) and took your chances, unsure of the fish, the nasty little sea, and the storms. I suppose Jesus could have gotten them to follow quite easily had he asked when the nets were still empty at the end of a long night: “Your life sucks; come with me.” But he showed them what it felt like to come in with all the fish sticks Mrs. Paul could have wanted and then said, “Leave your nets and come on.”

He called them to courage: come and see.

I know my sense of God’s presence has been heightened by the courageous moves my friend Gordon has made over the past couple of weeks. He has heard Jesus’ call and he has answered. After twenty years, yesterday was his last day as pastor of his church. He resigned to see what God has next for him. He’s knocked down most every wall around him. I am proud of and challenged by my friend.

Annie Dillard is actually talking about writing as she uses the metaphor of home deconstruction, the idea being that you can’t get too tied to any one sentence or paragraph. You have to be willing to lose them all and start over. Another writing book I read years ago suggested, when it came to rewriting and editing, to find the sentence you loved best in what you had written and discarding it to prove to yourself nothing you had written was sacrosanct. They’re right, unfortunately. Of course the other side of the page is being so self-critical that none of it feels worth keeping and you become paralyzed by even the smallest thing, unable to see beyond the minutiae that fill the page.

When it comes to writing/telling/living our life stories, the metaphor works fairly well. We have certain things about our lives that we cannot imagine doing without, and some of them are things we shouldn’t discard. I have no intention, for instance, of spending my life any other way than married to the aforementioned great preacher. Beyond our defining covenants, though, we are called to be willing to leave our nets, to pull down the house, to do what it takes to go when God calls. In that year that King Uzziah died, the passage ends with Isaiah answering, “Here am I, Lord; send me.” We cannot let ourselves become so convinced that we are living our best life that we are not willing to see what else God might have for us. And we have to find a way to an “Uzziah moment” when the despairing details of life pull us to a place where we see only empty nets and long nights and have no ears for those calling from the shore.

The other piece to Ginger’s sermon had to do with the four young African-American men who walked into the Woolworth’s store in Greensboro, North Carolina and sat down to be served at the all-white lunch counter, sparking a national sit-in movement. That happened fifty years ago this past week. The anniversary was marked by the opening of the International Civil Rights institute and Museum in the now renovated Woolworth’s building, and a group from our church drove up there after services yesterday. I had to work, but I did hear a piece on the radio that included interviews with a couple of the men. I was taken by this clip:

“We were totally exhausted,” he said, spending time—as college students always have—discussing “society in general, specifically people we loved and admired.” They gave their parents a hard time “because of what we thought they had not done.” The young men couldn’t understand how they could live with segregation. “To us, that didn’t make sense. Why not do something about it?”


Then they realized they were judging the wrong people. “Our parents didn’t do so badly; after all, look at us. All these months we had been talking and giving our parents hell,” he remembered. And with all the opportunity in the world, “I haven’t done one thing.” To walk away would be irresponsible.

And the walls came tumbling down.

If you haven’t figured it out by now, I’m rehashing the sermon because I need to hear it again. I can hear the voice and I’m trying to figure out which wall needs to go, and praying for the courage to knock it out and the sense to duck.

Peace,
Milton

P. S. — There’s a new recipe.

rainy day

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
-
2

take the umbrella,
she said
but I was not going
to be
gone for long and I
don’t mind
getting a little wet
I dry
off rather quickly

the rain lasted most
all day
a background of soft
applause
to a thoughtful day
and I
must say I concur

there aren’t many days
like this
when hope clings to me
like rain
and love runs freely
like rain
in a storm of thanks

Peace,
Milton

listening

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
-
1

I’m watching midnight come and go
the same way I do most nights,
sitting at the keyboard with a glass
of wine wondering what to write
and listening to some old friend
sing me into the solitude that
sows some sort of word play.

some nights I know the very song
I want to hear, but then some
send me searching for just the right mix
of moment and memory that
lets the words start wandering
into shape and sequence singing
in harmony, I suppose

because though the house is quiet
and I am the only one awake
I rarely think of myself writing
alone; I am panning for words
on the banks with anyone
who would find simple words and
polish them into brilliance

by listening and learning from
those who have panned and penned
already, because they show how to
line up words in ways that break
open hearts in ten words or less:
I was taken by a photograph of you
how did you do that, Jackson?

Peace,
Milton

*the lyric is from “Fountain of Sorrow” by Jackson Browne.

where does the time go?

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
-
1

I was getting ready for work yesterday morning when I heard the teaser on NPR about a story to play that afternoon asking, “Why does time fly when you get older?” I smiled, one, because I knew I would have to find the story later to hear what they said (I don’t get to listen at work), and, two, because I have my own working theory. I’ll start with the latter.

When you’re four years old and summer seems to last forever and birthdays take forever to arrive, time moves slowly because each year is such a significant fraction of life as a whole: at four, a year is a quarter of your existence. When you’re, say, fifty-three (as I am), that same year is one fifty-third of your total life – a much smaller fraction – and that year flies by. I think it also makes a difference that a four year old has the afternoon to chase butterflies and play in the yard (though today’s four year olds appear to be much more tightly scheduled, I’ll admit) and the days at fifty-three are pretty full. I had a prep list that made my afternoon move along quite briskly, thank you.

When I got home tonight and had a chance to read the story on the NPR website, I was pleased to see that my theory of how time flies made the short list, along with a couple of other ways of explaining how we understand and remember the days we live through, which were all very interesting. There’s another reason time appears to be gaining speed, or perhaps even gaining ground, that the article didn’t mention: death. At four, and for several years afterwards, life is an unending prospect, therefore any sense of having to keep time is way down the list. Everyday feels like it lasts forever because you feel like you’re going to last forever. Again, at fifty-three, not so much. And I’m not just talking about aging.

My friend David has been gone a little over a month now. For whatever reasons, Facebook keeps inviting me to reconnect with him, which I would love to do and I have even written on his page in the last week, but the truth is I can’t. I’m out of time. Time feels shorter because I ran out of it with him. Davy died too soon, yet I am aware I am entering a phase of life where saying goodbye to friends is going to become part of the fabric of my existence with greater consistency, and I’m left wondering how time could pass so quickly as to bring us to a closing scene.

My reading of Genesis has lead me to think of Eden as Paradise partly because there were no clocks. Time was not an issue. God came and walked with them in the cool of the evening and it didn’t really matter what day it was, only that it was time to walk. Sunrise brought a new day, sunset brought a new night, each one a link in a chain of eternal possibilities. The serpent promised the fruit would give Adam and Eve knowledge and what they learned was how to tell time. Well, they learned they couldn’t tell time anything; they learned how to tell time was passing. When Cain murdered his brother and death became part of the picture, it was time for a calendar: what day it was mattered because there weren’t that many of them.

Yet, if we only think of time as the string of moments that take us from Beginning to End, we’re not getting the whole picture. When we talk about light, we can describe it as both a particle and a beam, a point and a progression. Both things are true, though we aren’t capable of seeing both things at once. Time, I think, is much the same. It is a particular moment, a sequence of events, a span of emptiness, a culmination of a lifetime, a river of existence, a circle of gratitude. Perhaps time passes more quickly as we age because we begin to understand more of what it is, more of the layers of our lives.

Then again, perhaps it passes more quickly because we begin to see how little we understand. Look at the verbs we use: we tell, take, make, spend, waste, save, do, have, lose, mark, and keep time, to name a few. Still, our predominant perspective is one of a ticking clock: we are on a limited schedule; time is running out. I’ve been reminded this week of the old gospel songs about heaven because I’ve been immersed in Patty Griffin’s new gospel record, Downtown Church. One of the songs she sings is James Moore’s “Never Grow Old”:

I have heard of a land on the faraway strand
’tis a beautiful home of the soul
built by Jesus on high, where we never shall die
’tis a land where we never grow old


never grow old, never grow old
in a land where we’ll never grow old
never grow old, never grow old
in a land where we’ll never grow old

Many of those old heaven songs grew out of the first twenty or thirty years of the last decade, during The Great War and The Great Depression. I’ve mostly thought of them as escapist, but tonight, as I try once more to understand time, I wonder if I have sold them short. Instead of wanting out of this world, perhaps they see time as a dimension, a layer of life, that is clouded by clocks in this phase of our existence. What eternity offers is a return, or better a restoration, of time in its wholeness, meant to be something full of possibilities rather than being relegated to regulating how close we are to death. OK, so that was a little esoteric. My point is we are not held hostage by the clocks counting down to this life, as we know it, coming to an end. Yes, the limits and obligations of our existence are real, but they are not the final word. One day we will get to a place where we know the four year old’s endless afternoon was truer than our sense of impending doom. What Jesus defeated on the cross was death, which means clocks don’t count when it all is said and done, and life is too short to be consumed with what’s next on the schedule.

Peace,
Milton

church in the snow

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
-
3

Since we can’t get to church this morning because of the snow and ice, I’ve put together a service of poems, songs, and a film clip. So, having gathered, let us prepare our hearts for worship.


Our call to worship is “Morning Poem” by Mary Oliver.

Every morning
the world
is created.
Under the orange

sticks of the sun
the heaped
ashes of the night
turn into leaves again

and fasten themselves to the high branches —
and the ponds appear
like black cloth
on which are painted islands

of summer lilies.
If it is your nature
to be happy
you will swim away along the soft trails

for hours, your imagination
alighting everywhere.
And if your spirit
carries within it

the thorn
that is heavier than lead —
if it’s all you can do
to keep on trudging —

there is still
somewhere deep within you
a beast shouting that the earth
is exactly what it wanted —

each pond with its blazing lilies
is a prayer heard and answered
lavishly,
every morning,

whether or not
you have ever dared to be happy,
whether or not
you have ever dared to pray.

Let us join together in singing our opening hymn.

Julie Miller will now lead our time of confession: “Broken Things.”

Our first reading is “Poem” by Mary Oliver.

The spirit
likes to dress up like this:
ten fingers,
ten toes,

shoulders, and all the rest
at night
in the black branches,
in the morning

in the blue branches
of the world.
It could float, of course,
but would rather

plumb rough matter.
Airy and shapeless thing,
it needs
the metaphor of the body,

lime and appetite,
the oceanic fluids;
it needs the body’s world,
instinct

and imagination
and the dark hug of time,
sweetness
and tangibility,

to be understood,
to be more than pure light
that burns
where no one is —

so it enters us —
in the morning
shines from brute comfort
like a stitch of lightning;

and at night
lights up the deep and wondrous
drownings of the body
like a star.

Our second hymn will be led by Emmylou Harris and Robert Duvall: “I Love to Tell the Story.”

Our second reading is “Thanks” by W. S. Merwin.

Listen
with the night falling we are saying thank you
we are stopping on the bridges to bow for the railings
we are running out of the glass rooms
with our mouths full of food to look at the sky
and say thank you
we are standing by the water looking out
in different directions.

back from a series of hospitals back from a mugging
after funerals we are saying thank you
after the news of the dead
whether or not we knew them we are saying thank you
looking up from tables we are saying thank you
in a culture up to its chin in shame
living in the stench it has chosen we are saying thank you
over telephones we are saying thank you
in doorways and in the backs of cars and in elevators
remembering wars and the police at the back door
and the beatings on stairs we are saying thank you
in the banks that use us we are saying thank you
with the crooks in office with the rich and fashionable
unchanged we go on saying thank you thank you

with the animals dying around us
our lost feelings we are saying thank you
with the forests falling faster than the minutes
of our lives we are saying thank you
with the words going out like cells of a brain
with the cities growing over us like the earth
we are saying thank you faster and faster
with nobody listening we are saying thank you
we are saying thank you and waving
dark though it is

Let us now come together for Communion.

The Gatlin Brothers will offer our closing hymn.

Let us go out with joy as Lyle Lovett and his Large Band offer the postlude.

Go in peace, live in grace, trust in the arms that will hold you.

Peace,
Milton

1...154155156...248Page 155 of 248
© Newspaper WordPress Theme by TagDiv